Seven Travel games

I guess most parents of small children have heard the cry

Are we nearly there yet?

 before they have traveled for half an hour down the road.

We try to keep some audio books, in the car, but games provide variety. Games are particularly useful when travelling on public transport and trying to avoid extra luggage.

All these games only require a child and either an older child or an adult. They can be extended to involve more people.

• Counting games: anything can be counted depending on the age of the child. Coloured cars, coloured doors, Christmas trees and so on.

• I spy is particularly useful on the bus, I don't know why but it is. Beware of children trying to play with phrases and restrict them to nouns rather than adding in adjectives. We tend to play using the word's initial sound although this tends to invoke the wrath of older children who want to use the letter name. It is easy enough to play with both.

• Fizz, Buzz. This makes tables fun. The multiples of one number are designated as fizz and those of another as buzz. For example, multiples of five are fizz and multiples of two are buzz. Counting then starts taking turns to count so counting from one to ten would go

one
buzz
three
four
fizz
six
seven
eight
nine
fizz buzz


 Obviously, other tables can be used or more added with different sounds.


• The Bible game is a yes/no game to guess a Bible character. One person chooses a character but doesn't name them. Everyone else asks questions that can be  answered either yes or no until the correct character is found. It is useful for helping children learn who was in the Old or New Testament, who had a book named after them and so on. It is easy to teach the terms Epistle, prophet and Pentateuch with this game. Beware, if you find yourself getting into difficulties, of the child who is convinced that Zacchaeus is  in the Old Testament.

• History game: the yes/no game can be played using characters from the rest of history. The level of difficulty can be altered according to the players or adjusted to their recent learning.

• Items game: another yes/no game to guess objects. The person who chose a zipper kept us all guessing for ages.

• Country game is a little different. Someone says a country and the next person has to then come up with another country beginning with the last letter of the first country so a sequence might be

England

Denmark

Kenya

Australia

Argentina

Austria

Afganistan

The rules can be varied to allow continents, cities or even mountains (it isn't good to get K2!). It also becomes obvious that many countries both begin and end with the letter a.

Do you have games that you play while travelling? Please do share them in the comments.

This is linked to Growing Homemakers.

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